In response to the previous article, Whitehurst defends his article on imitation; it is different from Beilin's structural terms, and significant because much is known about imitation. Zimmerman challenges Beilin's interpretation of Piaget's structural assumptions. Brody maintains that children's qualitative changes in moral reasoning are best…

Undergraduates discussed a moral issue with a confederate who had the same opinion (no controversy) or opposite opinion (controversy) within either a cooperative or a competitive context. Subjects in the controversy conditions indicated more conceptual conflict, engaged in more information seeking, and were more accurate in taking the cognitive…

Beilin examines the previous three papers. In explaining cognitive development, social learning theory fails to account for rule invariance in the face of capricious and informationally impoverished experience, does not explain the acquisition of abstract rule systems, and offers less flexibility than Piaget's explanations based on operations and…

The author clarifies common misunderstanding about the theory that social learning is concerned with shaping of children's moral behavior through differential reinforcement, which portrays children as mere mimics of socialization agents. Social learning is defined in relation to the cognitive developmental approach to moral development and its…